From the Poisoned Tree
by moonswirl
Summary: Prelude #16 to ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH, coming in July. (See author's note inside) An AU story set across the Arrowverse. In this installment: Even before the Lances adopted her, Laurel has wanted to find out where she came from... for better or for worse.


_**A/N:** I was meant to start writing and posting these back in January, however life happened, and progress didn't happen, so now here I am, a little over two months late but finally kicking things off! This coming July, as I've done for the past two summers, I'll be leading a 100-day countdown story set across the Arrowverse (featuring Supergirl, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, and Arrow). I decided to do things a little differently this year. For one thing, the entire 100 days will be a single story spread over 100 days, one chapter to every day. And for another, the more planning I did, I saw the possibility and the need to lay in some ground work in the form of preludes._

 _Twenty-four prelude one-shot stories, six each to the four series (again, it was meant so that each month from January to June would have one of each show, but now… yeah ;)), posted every 5 (or 6) days._

 _The story this will all be leading to, **Once More Unto the Breach** , is an alternate universe story (not another Earth, ha :D), which will soon become evident enough. It's very possible you do not watch all four of the shows, but I highly encourage you to seek out the other preludes, as they will help to fill in this world I'm very excited to share with you guys!_

 _Alright, enough chit chat, let's go! If you have any questions, send them my way and I'll be happy to answer them!_

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 **FROM THE POISONED TREE  
** _Prelude to_ _ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH  
_ (16 of 24)

 **Location:**  
 **MAIN EARTH, THE CITY BENEATH THE BREACH**  
 _ **(ARGUS designation)**_

To this day, she sometimes still has the nightmares of her childhood. It wasn't that she was mistreated, no, not to any degree beyond her capability. But there was a loneliness… an unwavering feeling that something was missing in her life. It wasn't hard to know what that something would have to be, even back then. For the first seven years of her life she had lived at the orphanage, with other parentless boys and girls. Some of them had stories, little bits of information they could cling to, and she remembered feeling like she'd rather know what they knew, of deaths or abandonments or removals, anything, instead of what she had, which was nothing at all. She had been four years old the first time she'd worked up the courage to ask one of the nuns about her parents, about where she'd come from. The old woman had looked at her with the pitying eyes of love, because much as she would have liked to give her something, anything, she couldn't. There was nothing to tell. And she had picked her up and brought her to sit on her knees, brushing her hair gently with her worn hands.

"However you came to be with us, my little Laurel, you are here, and you may not have a mom or dad, but I promise you, you have people around you who love you very much."

And for a time this would satisfy her. And when the old sadness would creep back in, she would recall the words like a security blanket. It didn't always work, much as she wished it would. Sometimes it would only feel like something someone said so they wouldn't have to say the real thing. Sure, they loved her here, but they didn't really have a choice, did they? It was their job to care for all of them children, and it was in them to answer to the task. But for all that she had still ended up here, which meant either her family was dead… or they hadn't wanted her and so they had tossed her aside. She tried not to think of that option, but so long as she didn't know the truth it couldn't be eliminated as a possibility, could it?

And then a miracle had happened. When she was seven years old, she was adopted. From one day to the next she had a father, a mother, and even a little sister. She wasn't Laurel the orphan anymore… She was Laurel Lance.

Her new mother and father were good, loving people, and she knew at once that she was in a good place, or maybe she just convinced herself she was, just in case. Even so, her immediate ally in that house was the couple's young daughter, not much younger than herself at the time. From the moment they met, it felt as though she and Sara had always been meant to be sisters, and now they were. All the terrible loneliness she had felt before now seemed like a distant memory, although sometimes she did have those bad dreams, trying to convince her that all of this would disappear, right when she thought it was really hers, and then she would be lonelier than ever because she would have been given the chance to really have people she had come to love and then they would all go away again. Bless Sara, her dear sister. She never let the nightmares keep hold of her very long. She'd crawl up into her bed and wake her, and then allow her to fall asleep again in the secured knowledge that she wasn't alone.

The next three years had easily been the best in her young life so far. She had let herself get lost in the wonder of her new home, new family, enough that the old question hardly seemed to bother her anymore. Of all the things that might have sent her spiraling back down that path, it was another orphan seeking her birth family, albeit a fictional orphan. In this case, it was that curly redhead Annie, as her school had chosen to do the musical to present to parents and families and all, right before Christmas. Laurel didn't actually end up playing Annie herself, or any of the other orphan girls, which she had taken as something of a relief, though years later she found out her parents had spoken to her teacher, suggesting it might have been more sensible to place her elsewhere.

She might have walked away from this experience with a reinforced feeling of belonging to the new family she now had, and to some degree she did. But at the same time another part of her identified so much more to little Annie's desire to find out where she'd come from, despite her not having anything like that half of a locket to guide her way. She had nothing, nothing except the small facts of her existence, like her name, her date of birth, and the orphanage where she had been raised before her adoption, and her being only ten years old didn't exactly leave her much in the way of solutions. Even so, she spent the next few years building up what little case she could. She would scour old newspapers in the time surrounding her birth, hoping maybe to find some article detailing one tragedy or another, where some couple had died, leaving behind a baby girl. Other times she would look at men and women on the street, or anywhere out in the world, look and stare at them, trying to see if somehow any of them bore some resemblance to her that might have pegged them for the people who had abandoned her all those years ago.

She was fourteen when Sara discovered her covert search and at once offered herself up to help. They weren't so little anymore now, were they? They could find out something, surely they could. And so they did their best and started really looking into things. Sara had wanted them to ask their father. He was a police officer after all, and he could look for information in places the two of them could not. Laurel had thought about this a long time ago, though she hadn't worked up the courage to go through with it. For one thing, she told herself he would have done this search himself a long time ago if he had any intent to track down his adopted daughter's birth parents, and if he had looked, and he had found the answer, and hadn't told her by now, then the answer couldn't be good. Either that or he hadn't looked at all, or he had and he hadn't found anything. But one way or the other, the other reason she hadn't asked him before, the real one, was that she didn't want him to feel like he wasn't enough for her, like she needed to find her first parents because she didn't love her new ones, which couldn't have been further from the truth.

She was nineteen by the time she found out what he had to say, after Sara had taken up the initiative to just go ahead and ask him. Laurel hadn't wanted her to do it, and she'd been briefly upset afterward, but it was done now, and in the end maybe it had been the right thing to do. It turned out their father _had_ done his research. He'd found out the identity of her birth parents when she was still a child, though he hadn't said anything about what he'd found, not wanting her to carry the weight through these growing years. She might have been angry with him, for holding back something so massive from her, something she had wanted to know so bad for so long, but one look into his face and she knew he hadn't kept this secret in ease, and for that she couldn't be all that upset. He held her answer, and that counted for something. Even so, after all the time she'd spent wanting to know, now that it was real, that it could be discovered with one request to her father, she found she was actually sort of afraid to go through with it. What would she learn?

It took her a whole year to finally ask that he tell her. Were they dead? How had they died? Were they alive? Why had they abandoned her? Had she been taken from them? What was it? Who was she?

Of her birth father, he knew nothing. In all likelihood, her mother had never identified him for being the father of her child. And of her mother… She was alive and well, prosperous even. She had given up her daughter the day she was born and had never looked back, leaving so little a trace that it really would have taken police connections to track her down, which of course it had. Now, he could tell her the rest, which at this point came down to her birth mother's name. All she had to do was ask and he would tell her. He pointed out however that, once she knew, it might incite her to push further, to find out more. But she could also decide to take what she'd already been told and cut her losses from there.

She wanted to know. She had waited so long, and now to be so close… She couldn't have turned away. So she asked, and he told her. And it was more than she could have expected. It was so strange to be told a name she already knew and have to tell herself… 'That's my mother… that's my family.' She was a business woman, Laurel had seen her on the news several times over the years, but she had never made the connection, not even in her phase of staring down people in search of familial resemblance, which was almost funny now because, calling up the woman's image in her mind, the two of them did look very much alike. Maybe her mind had ignored the connection because it would have never occurred to her in a million years that _this_ could be her mother.

She had been working up the courage to possibly approach her, to go to her and say 'hello, I'm the baby you gave up twenty years ago.' She had no idea what would come of it, if anything at all would come of it, but she had to consider it. Sara, for how much she had always helped her in the search for her birth parents' identities, suddenly didn't seem so sure Laurel should go through with it. Laurel couldn't understand why, except maybe that it might pull them apart. It might have been called irony, because in the end they _were_ pulled apart, just not the way she'd thought.

One day, Sara disappeared.

She hadn't come home the night before, and by the time a whole day had passed where she hadn't returned, and they hadn't been able to reach her or track her down, the worry settled into their house like an unshakeable infestation. Days went by, days, weeks, months, where an extensive search turned out not a single clue as to her whereabouts. It was as though she'd just disappeared off the face of the Earth. As devastated as their parents were, and they had been that, very much so, Laurel felt as though her entire world had fallen to pieces. Sara, her little sister, who had made all the difference in her life since they were children… She couldn't be gone, she couldn't… Laurel couldn't accept it…

When a year had gone by, Laurel had done the thing she had wanted to do for so long. She sought out her birth mother. In the desperation of Sara's loss, it just felt as though she needed to take that leap, hoping maybe it would work out, and something good would happen. Sara had been so involved in that search, she kept telling herself, though she also remembered how in the end she had counseled against meeting the woman who had given her up. She still went through with it, and after feeling like her heart might rocket from her chest with how much the wait agonized her, her mother's assistant had told her to step into the office.

Of all the things she had thought would happen, all the things she hoped or feared would happen, that her mother should welcome her with open arms and a tearful embrace was without a doubt the smallest and deepest guarded hope she'd held, and yet that was what happened. Her mother proclaimed a story of heart rending choices and years of regret. She told her how she had hoped that this day would come and, now that it had, the two of them should never be parted again.

It almost seemed too good to be true, and years later, Laurel would realize it wasn't just 'almost.'

But, until then, what it seemed to her was yet one more fortunate turn in her life. Her birth mother came to take more and more importance to her, and Laurel saw that she did the same for her, too. Her birth mother had even donated a substantial cash reward for any information on Sara's whereabouts. She had also taken Laurel under her wing, grooming her to join the 'family business.' It was something for her to focus on, that had nothing of the sadness of her lost sister, and in the years that followed, she really came to thrive. And then Sara was found. She was alive.

It had been five years since she'd disappeared, long enough that for all the hope they still carried there was also a part of them that had needed to give her up for dead, if they were ever expected to cope and carry on. But now she was back, and she wasn't dead, and felt like the momentum of their carrying on as best they could had been brought to a halt.

Sara wouldn't speak of the last five years. Whatever had happened to her, it had to have affected her so deeply, and so they did their best not to force her to say anything, even if they all just wanted to know that she would be alright. She had changed in some ways, grown quieter, and in other ways she hadn't changed at all. When they had first been reunited, she had pulled her so tight, almost trembling, and Laurel had done the same. Her sister had missed her just as much as she had.

Knowing not to expect anything for a while of what _she_ had been through in the past five years, Laurel had at least told her about what her life had been like. She didn't go too much into the subject of the long search, or the despair of her loss. Instead, she told her about reuniting with her birth mother and how it had all gone much more wonderful than she could have imagined. She told her how she'd been working for the company, how much good work she'd been doing. Sara… She said she was happy for her, but there was something closed off about the response, like maybe she didn't mean it. Laurel tried not to see it.

Weeks later, her birth mother's secrets were exposed. Soon, the whole world, Laurel included, came to see her for what she truly was. She was sent to prison, and Laurel found herself – thanks to some safeguards installed by her birth mother – placed in charge of the company. Not that she wanted it, not at first. The betrayal was felt so painfully, and worst of all, now everyone saw her and decided she must have been as bad as her. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, all of that… She wanted to quit, wanted to disappear.

She didn't back away. After some soul searching, she chose to face the challenge head on. She _would_ run the company, and she would make it count for something, make it count for all the things she'd believed it did when she'd come to work here. She had learned a lot from her mother in those few short years. She had learned plenty more from her adoptive family, and from the nuns back at the orphanage. The world may have been ready to write her off, but if they did then they would have to come and see how wrong they were. She'd show them who she really was, and when they did see, then… they'd have to back her, not her birth mother's legacy.

THE END

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 _Check out the next prelude, coming May 25th!_


End file.
